The Ethics of Bread and Salt: A Gathering on Ethical Practices, Curation and Research

The Ethics of Bread and Salt was a long-table dinner curated by a cohort of students from our Public History MA and Dr Kara Blackmore. It extended themes of the Manifesting Exhibition through the act of sharing a meal.  

The event gained its title from the Arabic phrase baynatna khubz wa milh (بيناتنا خبز وملح), meaning "bread and salt between us.” The idea is that those who have shared bread and salt cannot treat each other badly. In an age of rising global conflict, dinners such as this model how coming together can become a political act.  

The concept of the evening was for guests to come together and manifest ethical outcomes for curatorial practices. On arrival, people were invited to view the exhibition, manifest and connect with its ideas.  

Guests then gathered across tables. They sat based on an area that their practice or thinking was most aligned to: protest, making and pressing, anti-institutionalism and radical citation.  

The tablecloths were designed by Ceara Walsh, Yumeng Wu and Zoe Thorn, student co-hosts. They reimagined images and quoted extracts from manifestos in the exhibition and archival references from UCL Special Collections as a creative form of practice-based research.  

Individuals shared food and conversed with each other around avenues for ethical agreement between different stakeholders. 

Marker pens littered the table, and guests were invited to add their own words to the tablecloth in response to various provocations, which asked them to imagine what a more ethical and just future would look like.  

By the end of the night, the table was covered in new messages, representing a dialogic approach to political thinking. The Urban Room will install these after they are dyed with onion skins, representing a new contribution to the Manifesting Exhibition, which investigates the diverse ways people manifest through words, sound, and space.  

Food on the night was supplied by Zer, a women-led Middle-Eastern kitchen, chosen to create an embodied connection to the Arabic proverb, sharing bread and salt between us, with a rich variety of dishes enjoyed by all.  

The event was one of a series of activations taking place as part of the Manifesting Exhibition, which endeavour to radically reshape the way institutional spaces are used within the community. The next is the Urban Rooms and Shared Futures Roundtable, for which bookings are currently open.  

See the final artworks that came from the dinner in the Manifesting Exhibition at the Urban Room running until 20 June.